Laundry

Our washer

We have a front-loading washer that uses very little washer and very little energy. It also spins out more of the water than would a conventional washing machine. That would typically mean that less energy was used drying clothes in a clothes dryer, but for us it means that it's a lighter load to carry out to the yard to hang out.

Laundry detergents today function very well on the cold water setting.

In addition, we just put all our clothes in one load—lights and darks together. In the past, this would have been a recipe for disaster, but with modern fabrics and dyes, we haven't had any problem.

Of course, if we had more laundry, we could easily separate them into two full loads, but with just the two of us, we don't generate enough laundry to do this.

Avoiding the fossil-fuel dryer

Line-drying our laundry is an appropriate symbol of our green "good life". It's easy to do and doesn't even take much time once you have some practice since hanging the clothes isn't much different than shaking clothes out before folding them.

Rough towels? This is one complaint I've heard. Personally, we've grown to appreciate towels with character. (Yes, really.) And hand and dish towels generally soften quickly after we use them. We've also found that clothes dried on a windy day are softer.

10) Save money - We haven't calculated our own savings, but we're using so much less electricity, it must be significant. (However, this is the least of the reasons we line-dry.)

9) Clothes last longer - This must be true since some of our clothes that we wear around the house are 20 years old or more …

8) Pleasant scent - We've been amazed not only at how fragrant sun-dried laundry can be, but also at how long the fragrance lasts. We love catching the sunny fragrance in our linen closet in winter! No fabric softener can beat it!

7) Saves energy, preserves environment, reduces pollution - We would line-dry for this reason if no other.

6) Healthy work - We try to build fitness into our everyday life. I don't like exercising solely for the sake of exercise (though we do that, too), but we especially appreciate getting some exercise while we accomplish something else.

5) Get the sunshine treatment - Sunlight bleaches and disinfects.

4) Replace another appliance - We still have our 25-year-old electric dryer, which we haven't used more than a dozen times over the last ten years. Since we have it, it's a convenience for emergencies, but we could otherwise get along without it. We don't expect to ever buy another.

NRDC: A Call to Action for More Efficient Clothes Dryers - Among others, one key finding is: If all of America’s electric dryers were updated to the most efficient models sold in other parts of the world, U.S. consumers would not only save $4 billion worth of energy per year, it would prevent roughly 16 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, equivalent to the pollution from three coal-fired power plants.

We estimate that 8% of households line-dry their laundry during 5 months of the year. If all Americans who currently do not use a clothesline started to use one for ten months of the year, we could avoid 12 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere, annually.

An estimated 17,700 reported U.S. non-confined or confined home structure fires involving clothes dryers or washing machines result in 15 civilian deaths, 360 civilian injuries and $194 million in direct property damage annually. Clothes dryers accounted for 92% of the fires.

60 million Americans live in approximately 300,000 community associations (mobile home parks, retirement communities, gated communities, condominiums, etc.). The majority of these restrict or ban the clothesline.

Drying for Freedom - a documentary about the advantages of drying clothes on the line—and the prohibitions against them.